The Wiener Library

The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide is one of the world's leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust and Nazi era. The Library's unique collection of over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony. It provides a resource to oppose antisemitism and other forms of prejudice and racism.

Venue Type:

Library, Archive, Museum

Opening hours

Monday to Friday 10.00-17.00Tuesday 10.00-19.30

Closed: Bank HolidaysFirst day of Rosh HashanahFirst day of Yom KippurChristmas & New Year

Admission charges

Free entry to the public.Photo ID and proof of address/letter of introduction required on first visit.Only Members or Friends of the Library are permitted to borrow books.

Access: In 2011 the Library moved to new premises in a historic location in Russell Square.• There is a disabled lift outside of the building, and once inside the building, all floors are accessible via the indoor lift.• There are adapted toilets on the basement level.• The nearest step-free underground station is King’s Cross, St Pancras.

The Wiener Library collects material related to the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. The Library has holdings of approx 65,000 items searchable online including books, pamphlets, periodicals and documents. The collection includes rare eye-witness accounts and an extensive press cuttings archive. The Library holds a photo archive of over 10,000 images, in the process of being digitised and made accessible through the website. Up to one third of the collection contains pre-war material and the Library continues to add to its collections.

Collection details

Archives, Photography, Religion, Social History, World Cultures

Exhibition details are listed below, you may need to scroll down to see them all.

Exhibition (temporary)

Fate Unknown: The Search for the Missing after the Holocaust

22 February — 30 May 2018

By the end of World War II, millions of people had been murdered or displaced by war and genocide. Families and communities were torn apart. Many were missing, and some people’s fates remain unclear to this day.

Despite immense logistical challenges, a number of charities, such as the British Red Cross Society and the Jewish Relief Unit, attempted to help find missing people and reunite families. Their efforts came together what became known as the International Tracing Service (ITS).

Co-curated with Professor Dan Stone (Royal Holloway, University of London), this exhibition tells the remarkable, little-known story of the agonising search for the missing after the Holocaust. Drawing upon The Wiener Library’s family document collections and its digital copy of the ITS archive, one of the largest document collections related to the Holocaust in the world, the exhibition considers the legacy of the search for descendants of those affected by World War II, and the impact of fates unknown.

Suitable for

Admission

Website

Events details are listed below. You may need to scroll down or click on headers to see them all. For events that don't have a specific date see the 'Resources' tab above.

Event

Toni Schiff Memorial Lecture: Moving Holocaust Stories

26 February 2018 6:30-8pm

Toni Schiff, like many Jews before, during, and after the Second World War, was constantly on the move. In part, she was searching for a place that was safe, or at least safer, which saw her move across national borders. But she was also someone who was moved across national borders to one of the most notorious of fixed sites of the Holocaust – Auschwitz. This lecture takes Toni Schiff’s story as a starting point to examine the Holocaust as an event that was both itself constantly on the move, and also involved the mass movement – both forced and ‘voluntary’ – of Jews around the European continent.

Tim Cole is Professor of Social History at the University of Bristol, where he is also Director of the Brigstow Institute. He is the author of a number of books on the Holocaust, most recently Holocaust Landscapes (2016).

This lecture is in memory of Toni Schiff with support from The Toni Schiff Memorial Fund.

Suitable for

Admission

Website

Book Launch: The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference

28 February 2018 6:30-8pm

Despite lasting less than two hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labour division and bureaucratization that made the “Final Solution” possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure. Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history.

Hans-Christian Jasch is the Executive Director of the Memorial and Educational Site of the Wannsee Conference. He has authored the definitive study, published in 2012, of Wilhelm Stuckart, state secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry, and the role of the civil service in Jewish policy.

Christoph Kreutzmüller is a curator of the new permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin. His acclaimed study Final Sale in Berlin: The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity 1930–1945 was published in 2015 by Berghahn Books - and was also launched at The Wiener Library.

Admission

Website

The International Tracing Service and the ‘Legacies of Political Humanitarianism’

8 March 2018 6:30-8pm

This talk explores the long history of the International Tracing Service (ITS), an agency established by the Western Allies during World War II to locate and reunite persons missing as a course of the hostilities. It tells the story of how states and non- governmental organizations — especially the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the International Committee of the Red Cross — used the purportedly neutral and universal humanitarian services of tracing missing victims of the Holocaust that the ITS offered in pursuit of their respective political and social agendas. Dr. Jennifer Rodgers will discuss how an organization established to ameliorate the crimes of Nazism reframed international humanitarian norms as well as the practice of relief itself. At the same time, Dr. Rodgers will also shine a light on the ways the ITS policies impacted not only Holocaust memory, but also how the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust was — and still is — negotiated.

Dr. Jennifer Rodgers, is a historian who is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Rodgers, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of South Florida, is PhD alumna of the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on German and European history in its inter- and transnational contexts. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Archives of Humanity: The International Tracing Service, The Holocaust and Postwar Order. It examines the International Tracing Service and the ways in which it reframed humanitarianism in the post-World War II world. Dr. Rodgers has held a wide array of fellowships and grants from institutions in the United States and Europe including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris; the Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement in Geneva, Switzerland; the Freie Universität in Berlin; and the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, Germany.

Admission

Website

Mothers, Sisters, Resisters? Motherhood and the Holocaust Twenty Years on

22 March 2018 6:30-8pm

Part of the Holocaust and Motherhood conference organised by Royal Holloway, University of London.

Women’s experience of the Holocaust remains a marginal subject. Even recent studies which claim to offer a comprehensive account tend to ignore or downplay the specific importance of women’s testimony. As we prepare to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Brana Gurewitsch’s path-breaking Mothers, Sisters, Resisters, Zoë Waxman will seek to explain why it is that women are still being silenced, and why motherhood, in particular, deserves serious attention.

Dr. Zoë Waxman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She previously taught in the history faculty in Oxford and at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she was fellow in Holocaust Studies. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017) as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide. A board member of the British Association of Holocaust Studies, she also sits on the editorial board of Holocaust Studies and the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. She is a trustee of The Wiener Library and a member of the academic advisory board for the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust galleries.

Online Learning Materials

A selection of the Wiener Library's unique stories and materials are now remotely accessible to anyone who wishes to learn more about the Holocaust and the Nazi era. The site allows users to trace different topics interactively, as well as providing background information on connected themes. The materials currently include detailed information on 'Childhood under the Swastika', 'Helping the Survivors' and the fascinating story of German-Jewish factory owner Ludwig Neumann.

Access: In 2011 the Library moved to new premises in a historic location in Russell Square.• There is a disabled lift outside of the building, and once inside the building, all floors are accessible via the indoor lift.• There are adapted toilets on the basement level.• The nearest step-free underground station is King’s Cross, St Pancras.

Website

E-mail

Telephone

020 7636 7247

All information is drawn from or provided by the venues themselves and every effort is made to ensure it is correct. Please remember to double check opening hours with the venue concerned before making a special visit.